Didi Chuxing, the Apple funded leading taxi company in China, has recently opened an AI-powered lab near the company's Cupertino headquarters in Mountain View, California. The lab will reportedly focus on self-driving cars aka intelligent driving systems and will be backed by Apple's $1 billion project funding.
The self-driving lab's close proximity with the Cupertino headquarters reaffirms Apple's growing interest in creating its own intelligent driving system. The new R&D lab is said to be just around 6 miles from the company headquarters in Mountain View.
Meanwhile, Didi has poached some high-profile professionals for its new self-driving lab such as Charlie Miller and Jia Zhaoyin, wherein the former is a renowned jeep hacker and Uber's Ex-self-driving engineer, and the latter is a senior software engineer from Google's self-driving project 'Waymo'.
According to Recode, Didi has partnered with Udacity (college-level nanodegree startup) to recognise and nurture talented graduates for the self-driving program. They will be jointly holding a tech contest for $100,000 award wherein five finalists will be shortlisted for the job at Didi's Lab.
